Which Is the Best CDP?

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have gotten hot this year, and you can understand why. Segmentation has become a mainstream practice.  Artificial intelligence is getting integrated into customer experiences, with attendant needs for high-quality, clean data. Customers expect consistent engagement with you across all channels, yet we all struggle to reconcile diverse customer and prospect data points.

Why CDPs?

CDPs address these challenges directly. Customer Data Platforms collect and aggregate customer information from various sources, such as CRM, Ecommerce, and other engagement and analytics systems. Marketers use CDPs to better understand, segment, and engage their customers and prospects.

Which CDP Is Best?

The good news is that the CDP marketplace is thriving.  Among the 18+ vendors we cover, we see nearly $1B in investment funding.  The bad news is that you the customer have a confusing and still-expanding set of choices.  How to decide?

Customer Data Platform


The CDP Marketplace divides into two broad categories. Source: RSG

 

Well, it turns out that while CDP vendors can appear similar on the surface, different use-case emphases makes them quite diverse under the covers.

At RSG, we evaluate vendors primarily based on the extent to which they address business use cases.  And so our new CDP research assesses whether and how different players  cover eight key scenarios.  We couple this with our usual deep scrub of strategic considerations, like the ecosystems around different vendors (hint: typically pretty shallow for this bunch).

The "best" CDP, then, is the one that matches your particular use cases and customer profile (e.g., your risk tolerance, budget, locale, and so forth).

If you're considering licensing a customer data platform, you can download a sample vendor evaluation (of IBM's UBX offering), to see how we critique these tools. 

And if your firm already subscribes to one or more RSG research streams, contact us to find out how you can add the CDP evaluations to your roster at a solid discount.

 

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Webinar: Composable CDPs - Myths and Realities

Register to learn what composability really means in a CDP context and how to distinguish vendor fluff from genuine opportunities. Come away with some conclusions that might surprise you!